Tools for me →

Whether you are trying to clean your data, spot patterns, or create a data visualisation, there are many free tools available online. Finding the right tool for your need and skill level, however, can be difficult. We have been testing out tools and profiling them below to help you decide which ones are best for the job you are trying to do.

Choose what you want to do in the panel to the left. Below, you'll see a list of tools tailored to help you get there.

Pure Data is an open source visual programming language designed for musicians, visual artists and performers to create software graphically, without writing lines of code. It is used to process and generate sound, video, 2D/3D graphics, but also interface sensors, input devices, and old-school MIDI files.

Detective.io is an online platform to store, browse and analyse data related to an investigation. It is designed for journalists, lawyers, business intelligence and researchers who need to organise data that is too complex for spreadsheets and too large to store in plain text formats.

Processing is an open source programming language built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the fundamentals of computer programming in a visual context. The project was started in 2001 by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry, both formerly working at the MIT Media Lab.

The R project is a highly extensible language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It provides a wide variety of statistical, such as linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering and graphical techniques.

RAW is a web app that can be used to create vector-based visualisations by drawing on a d3.js library through a user-friendly web interface. You can use RAW to visualise flows, clusters, hierarchies and correlations by displaying data on one of the many available complex charts.

This is a web tool to create interactive maps. It helps users with no coding skills to create interactive maps, while programming-savvy users can use its API and Javascript library to create more advanced maps.

This is a free-to-use online map that you can look at in your Internet browser. It has been online since 2004. It has the usual sorts of data you would expect in a map, including place names, roads and public infrastructure.

This is a spreadsheet application to create, store and analyse any kind of data, whether it's financial information about your organisation or a list of companies fined for violating environmental laws.

This is an online tool that makes word clouds out of any text – including texts found in blogposts, news articles or web pages. It analyses whatever text you give it and counts how often each word is used.

This is the free to use version of the commercial data analysis and visualisation software called Tableau Desktop (which costs US $1000). You can use it to make interactive charts, graphs and maps from your data.

A free web service that automatically maps news from any Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed. The only condition is that the news item or blog post must contain a location in the text of the RSS feed that Google Maps can recognize.

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VisualisingAdvocacy.org aims to inspire and support advocates to use information, design and technology in their work. It features Visualising Information for Advocacy, a book based on the Data & Design Notes published on the Drawing By Numbers site.